Birth Date:

Country of Birth:

Full Name:

Major Contribution:

February 11th, 1847

United States

Thomas Alva Edison

He invented the light bulb

Thomas Alva Edison was an only child and his mother, a former school teacher, taught him instead of sending him to school. Thomas loved to read, especially about Science where he then learned many experiments.

As a boy he had a great deal of imagination and curiosity, and was taken away from school because the teacher thought his non-stop questioning meant he was stupid. His first interest was chemistry, he read all could about the subject and he was only ten when he started growing vegetables, in the back garden and selling them so he experimented with them in the garage.

At the age of twelve he worked selling magazines and fruit on a train and starting printing a weekly newspaper on a printing press set up in the luggage van, but one day one of his bottles of chemicals broke and set fire to the van. He was kicked off the train and lost his job. He also suffered an injury which made him partially deaf. The paper was the first ever printed on a train.

A station-master, whose child saved he from an on-rushing train taught him Morse-code and Edison became a telegraphist. He worked in a few different telegraph offices in the United States and Canada. In 1869 he went to New York, he had no friends there and was in debt, but he had the luck to walk into a building of a telegraph company just as the telegraph stopped walking. He was the only person there who could fix it, and after that he was given a good job with the company. Soon afterwards he made loads of money by selling his design for a telegraphic instrument called a stock ticker which replayed information about share prices from the markets.

Edison developed a practical light bulb towards the end of 1879. In 1880, he designed this version - the first to have all the essential features of a modern light bulb - an incandescent filament in an evacuated glass bulb with a screw bottom.

A list of Edison's Inventions follows:

1868
• Invented the electrical vote recorder.
1869
• Invented the universal stock ticker.
1872
• Invented the "motograph".
• Invented the automatic telegraph system.
• Invented paraffin paper.
1875
• Discovered "Etheric Force," an electric phenomenon that is the foundation of wireless telegraphy.
1876
• Invented the electric pen used for the first "mimeographs".
1877
• Invented the carbon telephone transmitter, making telephony commercially practical. This included the microphone used in radio.
1877
• Invented the phonograph. This was Edison's favorite invention. He sponsored the Edison Phonograph Polka to help make the new device popular.
1879
• Discovered incandescent light.
• Radically improved dynamos and generators.
• Discovered a system of distribution, regulation, and measurement of electric current-switches, fuses, sockets, and meters.
1880
• Invented the magnetic ore separator.
1885
• Discovered a system of wireless induction telegraph between moving trains and stations. He also developed similar systems for ship-to-shore use.
1891
• Invented the motion picture camera.
1896
• Invented the fluoroscope.
• Invented the fluorescent electric lamp.
1900
• Invented the nickel-iron-alkaline storage battery.
1914
• Invented the electric safety miner's lamp.
• Discovered the process for manufacturing synthetic carbolic acid.
1915
• Conducted special experiments on more than 40 major war problems for the Navy Department. Edison served as Chairman of the Naval Consulting Board and did much other work on National Defence.
1927-1931
• Tested 17,000 plants for rubber content as a source of rubber in war emergencies. A piece of vulcanized rubber was made from a strain that he developed.

C. A. , N. B. and R. G.